The time I met Billie Sol Estes

At the risk of dating myself, did I ever tell you about the time I met Billie Sol Estes?

Estes, the famed Texas swindler who died this week, first came to fame in my hometown of Tyler in the early 1960s. His trial on charges that he swindled farmers in West Texas by selling them nonexistent fertilizer tanks was moved to Tyler on a venue change, and the Smith County judge who tried the case broke precedent by allowing some of the proceedings to be televised. Estes was convicted, but the verdict was overturned because of the courtroom cameras, and eventually he was convicted in a mid-1960s retrial.

My chance to meet Estes, however, came several years later, in 1978, during my first job out of college at the Tyler Morning Telegraph. I was assigned to cover the aggravated kidnapping trial of one Don Trull — not the Don Trull who played for Baylor and the Oilers and was recently selected for the College Football Hall of Fame, but a Mississippi promoter and wheeler-dealer of the same name. Trull was accused of breaking into an office of a Tyler businessman, pouring gasoline on the floor, holding an office worker hostage and threatening to blow the building up unless he received the money he claimed the businessman owed him.

Sounds like an open-and-shut case, doesn’t it? Didn’t turn out that way.

In what remains to this day some of the most bafflingly brilliant lawyering it has been my privilege to witness, Trull was defended by a 5-foot-3 dynamo from Longview named G. Brockett Irwin, a Bible-thumping wordsmith who never used five words when 15 would do. Rather than asking if someone had made a phone call, Irwin would ask if the witness “had engaged in telephonic communication.” Rather than asking if a person was inclined to fib, Irwin would ask about the person’s “propensities and proclivities for prevarication.” It wasn’t a smell, it was an “odoriferous emanation,” and the witness wasn’t a millionaire, he was “a man who possesses pecuniary wealth in excess of one million dollars.”

One of his greatest moments came when he called Billie Sol as a witness, based on the assumption that Estes also was involved in the scheme to defraud Don Trull. I don’t remember much about what Estes said, but I do remember him huddling with his personal attorney before he would answer a question in open court. I do recall that he referred to the businessman who was accused of swindling Trull as “a bald-faced liar and a perjurer” — and, of course, who would know better about those things than Billie Sol Estes?

At any rate, the jury in the case deliberated 17 hours over two days and eventually found Trull not guilty. It was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen in a courtroom, and I am convinced that it was due in large part to Jerry Irwin’s ability to dazzle the jury with rhetoric.

Actually, he dazzled Billie Sol, too. A few weeks after trying to accuse Estes of swindling Don Trull, Irwin ended up defending Estes in a mail fraud case in which Estes was convicted.

Irwin, alas, died in the early 1980s, and now Estes is dead as well. But I don’t think I ever enjoyed anything more during my days as a news reporter than watching Jerry Irwin sling five-dollar words at Billie Sol Estes.